1. All Singing, All Dancing, Baby!
2. Headlights & Halos
3. Kids of Cancer
4. Raise Your Glass
5. Save Us From Sorrow
6. Sunsets

I remember the first time I heard Saves the Day was on MTV2 (or something) when “At Your Funeral” was becoming popular and the vocals had such a tender quality to them I couldn’t help but love them. Anglesey’s Through Colour have that same endearing charm that defined Chris Conleys vocals for me back then, but with a heavier, punk-influenced-commercial-rock sound popularised by bands like Paramore. What a great combination that is, and it works so well; there are great tunes laid over this solid backing and lyrics that serve a real communicative purpose, thoughtful and full of emotion, yet still with room for interpretation for the listener to be able to find their own meaning.

I seem to spend more and more time in my car recently, going from one workplace to the next like some sort of music-teaching rent-boy, and so I was listening to this album over my car stereo towards the end of the day when I was pretty low on energy, When “Kids of Cancer” popped on and lifted my spirits entirely. It’s probably one of the least original tracks on the album, but they’ve chucked all the right musical techniques in there to push my buttons and fuck me if I wasn’t headbanging in my own little imaginary in-car-moshpit during this track, which is damn near perfect (apart from the unnecessary and bland half-time mid-section).

Through Colour don’t have all the hooks and harmonies to please the chart-topping-single-buying public just yet, but they’ve got a great, powerful sound that sets them apart from the field. I’m sure they’ll be up there touring with the big guys soon.

www.myspace.com/thisisthroughcolour

1. 99
2. Sweater Weather
3. Songs for a Rainy Day
4. Winnetka & Heart
5. Unspoken
6. Promenade
7. Touch my Heart
8. Nanny
9. Valiant
10. One Day at a Time

Well I don’t normally do this – reviewing tracks from an online stream, but let’s see how it goes.  Jacuzzi Fiend dub themselves as a “speed-emo” band, which I can’t say exactly fills me with excitement, although perhaps intrigue.  “99″ begins with a bit of piano before rocking in with the skatepunk, overlaid by loved-up lyrics (ah so that’s what they meant by speed-emo).  The whole track is pretty monotone, and for one which is heading towards 8 minutes long to use 4 chords stretches my patience an awful lot and doesn’t leave enough room for the vocal melody to vary.  This is a problem that transcends to many of their other songs.

“Song for a Rainy Day” is structured similarly to “99″, and even includes some Van Halen type finger tapping, although, just like on “99″, it goes on too long and is awkward to listen to because it’s so out of time with the backing.

Gosh these songs are long, most of them so far are past the 5 minute mark and include way too much instrumental stuff that largely consists of simple chord sequences and a basic lead guitar or something over the top.  Some of their sounds remind me of MxPx’s early days, especially “Unspoken”; the difference being that MxPx would have finished their songs after about 2m30s at the most, but Jacuzzi Fiend seem intent on stringing them out way longer than necessary.  They’ve got a lot of good ideas in their music, but they’re all so far apart, it’s like eating a massive pizza with a couple of tiny bits of really nice cheese and tomato and the rest is a standard base.  I mean I love a double speed drumbeat as much as the next skatepunker, but this is so relentless I can’t wait until each track finishes.

With some great editing, these 10 very long tracks could become 4 or 5 short and awesome tracks I’m certain.  One of the main reasons I like punk rock is that I have a short attention span and this makes me tense and frustrated.

www.myspace.com/jacuzzifiend

I was quite surprised that they hadn’t got round to soundchecking before the doors opened. That’s one thing that really bugs me. I don’t want to hear a band soundchecking just before they go on; it screams of unprofessionalism when you have to hear the neverending avant-garde poetry of the stage-hands – “one, two, two, two, two, check, check, check, check, two, two, one, two”. Anyway, the lights went down, everyone whooped and on came Lost Alone.

These were a very likeable band with fashionable haircuts, catchy emo/pop-punk songs and lots of energy. I especially enjoyed their original 3-part harmonies that were absolutely spot on, smooth and zipped around in contrary-motion, which coming from a 3-piece band is always impressive. For a 3-piece band also to come out with a sound so rich and full gives testament to their skill of setting up their instruments correctly and arranging their songs well. A great set that put me in a great mood for the night. So I went and bought some over-priced, watered-down lager. 7/10

I’d read a bit about Street Drum Corps briefly before I went to the gig, and it sounded a pretty impressive idea, experiment with mixing various percussion things with punk rock. So their slot began (after some more tedious sound checking) and 3 masked guys were hitting some upturned bins with sticks along to some backing track. Now, as a spectacle, this looked impressive, as they were bang on in time to the backing track, but everything was mimed, these bins weren’t even mic’d up, which made the whole little charade seemm like it would be more at home on Britain’s Got Talent than a punk rock show. I’m certain that it would still have sounded pretty cool if we could hear what they were actually doing.

They then started to get down to business, which is essentially rock and roll with a punk edge like Randy or Electric Frankenstein. The percussionist at the front had an array of floor toms, oil-drums and cymbals, which again was a good spectacle and was something different to see in a punk band, but you couldn’t hear a single thing he was doing apart from the odd cymbal crash. Not even when he was hitting the oil-drums with a baseball bat could you hear it as there was not a single section in the music that offered some space for this percussion. Whether it was the cheesy, over the top backing track chock full of synths and electronic drums or the main drums themselves, it made the percussionist at the front nothing more than a dancer who hit things. Take away the entertaining image of this on-stage chaos and the great stage presence of the camp frontman and what you’re left with was a badly mixed, mediocre sound that I’ve seen and heard a million times at local venues. 5/10

I saw 30 Seconds To Mars at the Give It A Name festival in 2008, and they put on a real good show then. Since then of course commercially they’ve gone from strength to strength, so I expected they’d have even more money to burn from their record label and would put on a mind blowing performance. I wasn’t wrong. Happily, the reason for their good performance was the way they structured the whole show, which demonstrated a superb thought process into what would give the most entertainment. Some of these structural effects were the way the curtain came down before their slot to hide their preparations, their quick transportation right to the top of the seated audience to do a couple of acoustic songs, the moving to a stage in the middle of the floor to give everyone a new angle on the band (which, incidentally didn’t stop the moshpit at the front from going crazy with some good-natured circle pits) and getting loads of audience members up on stage to sing their encore of Kings and Queens alongside some inaudible (as always) military drumming from the Street Drum Corps (see the video above that I recorded). I’m glad they spent all their time preparing this performance with truly effective ideas such as these rather than gratuitous special effects and props. A superb, enjoyable gig. 9/10

1. Empires
2. Paint the Sky
3. Worlds Apart

I love it when CDs start with a real kick in the teeth, the challenge, though, is making the rest of the music live up to the standard set at the beginning. Heights set the scene with an epic combination of soaring guitar and synth solos set over grinding guitar chords and leave us crashing down to Earth with a gutteral, screaming heap of hardcore metal.

A good range of varied articulations of different riffs keeps the sound interesting and when when the brutality meets the calm, surprisingly it works, and the layers of different emotions and feelings within the music are powerful.

A passionate and moderately high-pitched, Converge-like scream is often interspersed with understated, post-hardcore-esque melodic vocals with a few gang-shouts in there to hammer the odd chorus home.

With this little 3-tracker of a CD, it’s all about those various distinct level of music that have been carefully constructed so that on each listen there’s a new element to notice, a new tune or effect to prick up your ears.

Strong and compelling stuff.

http://www.myspace.com/weareheights

1. Of Our Lives
2. Snakecharm the Dead Whale
3. Syncopated Heartbeat
4. Warship Lanterns

I’ve always loved that poppy post-hardcore sound of bands like Silverstein, Circa Survive and the like, but are Avosetta sufficiently unique enough to produce something that differentiates them from the swathes of bands producing this stuff through the past decade? Well, no not really. Does it matter? Not to me it doesn’t. A good friend once said to me during our formative years of discovering good music “The good thing about liking punk music is that there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll like pretty much all punk music”. There’s obvious exceptions to this of course (which have become very apparent during my years as a reviewer), but generally it’s nice to be able to like almost a complete genre of music and many of its sub-genres and related genres.

Avosetta do what they do well, and wear their influences on a sleeve of post-hardcore pastiche. Complex lyrical structures and disjointed melodies remind me of Panic at the Disco and the softer parts of the vocals have a tone like Jimmy Eat World. All this is skilfully layered over heavy but tonal metally riffs, almost constant lead guitar lines to create a complex but listenable texture and interspersed with some intense screams to add a harder edge to the music, resulting in a combination of sounds that has been heard many, many times before, but there’s no real point in re-inventing the wheel arbitrarily.

There’s no point in pretending this is ground-breaking, but there’s great skill in the performance, song-writing, nice production and the structures of each track build up and break down at just the right moments. In short, if you’re into this kind of thing, there’s a good chance you’ll probably be into this.

http://www.myspace.com/avosetta